Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  I usually fried my chops. Then I’d add two drops of Liquid Smoke for flavor. I ate in front of my TV, which sat on the floor at the end of my mattress. I kept my electric frying pan, phone-answering machine, reading lamp, and pile of scripts next to the TV. I was seriously contemplating moving up to stealing steaks.

  Once in a while—usually via relayed messages from Genie—I’d hear from Dr. Koop or Dr. Kennedy, or Lane Dennis (the publisher at Crossway), asking what I was doing. The messages seemed totally surreal and got farther apart. I fell out of touch with my old partner Jim. I was just too embarrassed to talk.

  Meanwhile, I was offered a job directing Halloween Four (or was it Five?). Then somebody at Creative Artist’s Agency (CAA) said something about me directing a script I’d cowritten with Calder Willingham a few years before . . . more meetings. (High and mighty CAA were his agents, not mine.) Sandy Howard was about to be evicted from his apartment. I shoplifted a few more pork chops. Halloween Four (or Five) fell through. CAA didn’t call back. Sandy invited me for dinner. We ate a can of split pea soup. He was in even worse shape than me.

  Then Portofino was published.

  PART IV

  PEACE

  61

  I had been hiding in plain sight. One person I met in Hollywood—Frank Gruber—became a best friend. He explains:I’m an entertainment lawyer and I met Frank Schaeffer sometime in the mid ’80s when a few long forgotten clients wanted to buy a screenplay Frank had commissioned. It was a cheesy horror story Frank had wanted to direct but was then willing to give up. We did the deal and nothing came of it. But then a couple years later Frank had another screenplay he had written and he wanted a Hollywood lawyer.

  Frank remembered me from the other deal. He told me about his screenplay and I read it. It was a true story about Italians, both religious Catholics and Communist partisans, who save 92 Jewish orphans from the Germans. I read it on an airplane, and I remember being so moved, I teared up.

  I also remember thinking it was amazing that someone could write a story about saving 92 Jews, and yet there was almost nothing about Jews in the script. It was all about Christian faith. That began my association with Frank Schaeffer.

  The Foreigners was one of those film projects that “almost get made.” But it had an effect on me, because it was the first time I worked so closely with a client that, after dealing with the ethical niceties being a lawyer requires, I became his producer/partner.

  I’ll never forget the first time Frank visited in Santa Monica. We had a little guesthouse in the back and he stayed there and we worked on the screenplay. My son Henry was about three and he and Frank hit it off immediately, as Frank loves to read books to children.

  The next big moment in our relationship came several years later when Frank asked me to read the manuscript for his first novel, Portofino. I was the first person, other than Frank’s wife, to read the book. Because those of Frank’s screenplays that I had read had been wildly in need of rewriting, I expected the manuscript to be a mess. But the opposite was true. I read the whole thing over a July 4 weekend, laughing out loud, and reading passages out loud to my wife, Janet. The published version of the book differs from what I read in the first draft by at most one percent.

  It was in connection with Portofino that I learned that Frank was not what he seemed to be when it came to religion and politics. Frank had told me vaguely (“hiding his light under a bushel” to the end) that his father had been a Protestant theologian, but after reading Portofino I learned that there was more to it than that.

  His literary agent at the time mentioned casually that “of course a lot of Christian bookstores” might want to carry the book. Given Portofino’s jaundiced view of Christian fundamentalism, that surprised me, and that’s when I learned that Frank’s father, Francis A. Schaeffer, was a famous evangelical, and his mother, Edith Schaeffer, was equally prominent.

  I like to think that Frank is still the boy, Calvin, in his novels, who is afraid that if he gives the English girl he loves a pamphlet about predestination, she will be “predestined” not to want to be with him any more. But then perhaps I’m one of the liberals Frank complains about who assume that anyone who lives near Boston, writes novels, and has good art on his walls has the same views they do. Maybe that intimidated him. As close as we became over the past twenty years as we wrote screenplays together and traveled to locations for films for which the money always seemed to disappear, as we read each other’s work, as we visited each other’s families, it took years for Frank to gain the confidence that I would still be his friend if he told me about his deep Christian faith.

  As Frank grew to trust me more, and more freely shared his opinions, we began to enjoy our conflicts. I remember one trip to New York when I met Frank and Genie at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We were there to see the big Byzantine show they had in the late ’90s. In the cafeteria, we had a long argument about abortion rights. We were there to see the art, but we couldn’t stop arguing.

  Portofino got a rave six-column, half-page review in the Los Angeles Times by Richard Eder. It also got wonderful reviews in twenty or so other newspapers. I didn’t get one bad review in America (or in Great Britain when it was published there, or, to my knowledge, in the nine other countries where it was translated and published). And not one reviewer connected me to either my family, to L’Abri, or to “Franky,” the author of those crazy right-wing screeds.

  At last I wasn’t making lame-ass excuses: “The budget got cut. . . .The producer put his girlfriend in the movie. . . . I never did like the script. . . .” I hadn’t felt so happy about anything I’d done professionally since I was nineteen and I walked into the Chante Pierre Gallery and saw my name in the catalogue and fifteen of my paintings framed and beautifully lit.

  A few months later, I started writing a second novel, Saving Grandma. And though our financial situation was still dire, I didn’t feel broke any more. (In fact, I had never been as “broke” as I had imagined when sinking under my depression out in LA. My belief we were broke was a depression-fueled fantasy.) We were having financial troubles, but not anywhere near as extreme as I imagined. I was also no longer looking for those main-chance shortcuts, for the next steppingstone, rather than having the discipline and concentration to do what was right in front of me well.

  At last I was really working at my writing. I found that I had stumbled on something I possessed the patience to do well. When I wrote fiction (and secular nonfiction), I didn’t run out of steam. It seemed normal to do ten, fifteen, or twenty drafts. Mr. Parke would have been pleased. I was finally bucking up, showing a bit of spine!

  My learning curve was steep and slow. Since I never had much formal education, I learned by doing. My evangelical books were hastily written (or dictated). And they were merely propaganda. But at least I was forced to start a process where I learned to write a bit better with each project, a process that—when I began to take my writing seriously as writing—began to pay off. In any case, I was thirty-nine before I finally wrote something I was proud of.

  I snapped out of my funk, turned down an offer to direct some crap picture in Hong Kong, framed the L.A. Times review, and changed my phone number. Since I had screwed up our money matters completely, Genie insisted on taking over our family’s finances. I should have begged her to do that many years before but was too proud to admit that there are things—many things—that I’m not good at.

  Genie mortgaged our home. (We had paid cash for it in the flush old evangelical days.) She did a brilliant job of managing our money, paid off our debts, started a successful small business, and, over a few years, pulled us out of a steep financial nosedive.

  After my second novel was published, I was starting to feel almost sane. On a visit back to LA (I was there doing a reading at Dutton’s from Saving Grandma), I went to a nearby Ralph’s, bought fifty dollars’ worth of pork chops, and then put them back into the meat display case. I could have just sent the company a check, but I enjoyed
the symbolism of this theatrical bit of penance.

  Where my evangelical books had once sold a hundred thousand copies in weeks—for instance, during the period when Dobson bought, then gave away, tens of thousands of copies of A Time for Anger—Portofino sold a mere several thousand over several months. Nevertheless, it had good hardcover (and later paperback) sales for a first novel by an unknown writer (unknown to the fiction-buying secular public, that is). Saving Grandma did fine, too. And over the years since, some books have done better than others. (Oprah helped one make the best-seller list.) But the earnings from my secular writing feel genuine, not like some sort of Monopoly money, which was the way my Jesus-dollars always struck me.

  There were a few final and strange little moments on my way out of the evangelical world. At first, Macmillan (who published the original hardcover) foolishly thought they could sell Portofino in the Christian Booksellers Association market, given the family name and my evangelical “track.” As soon as the word got out that Portofino was funny at the expense of the fundamentalist subculture, not to mention that there was sex in the book, Macmillan got cartloads of CBA returns. I received a handful of irate letters from a dozen or so evangelical bookstore managers, all of whom, a few years before, would have killed to have me come to their stores for an event.

  When Portofino was published, my sister Susan was very upset and wrote me a barely coherent seven-page letter. She faulted me for both making my novel too fictional—“We never did anything like that!”—and not for not being true to life—“Why don’t you tell what it was really like?” Her reaction was couched in pietistic terms.

  I didn’t feel like explaining that writers write about what they know and that if I’d been the son of a steelworker, I probably would be setting my novels in a steel town. I also knew I wasn’t alone. François Truffaut infuriated his family when he made The 400 Blows. His relations with his parents became intolerable as the autobiographical film was released in the early ’60s. Artists are like creatures who swallow themselves. We process our lives into what we make.

  Susan and I didn’t speak for a while. We had no dramatic reconciliation, just began talking about our mother’s needs. I think we are friends again.

  Debby didn’t like Portofino either, but her reaction was mild since she is an inveterate reader of fiction and appreciated my writing, if not the thinly veiled biographical side of my novel. Priscilla had no problem with the novel, laughed, and at one point said “Be sure you don’t show this to Susan!”

  My mother and I never talked about my first or subsequent semiautobiographical novels, but I did learn that she’d given away half a dozen or so copies of Portofino to friends. So I think she was at least as proud of me for my “secular success” (something she had always wanted for her writing that eluded her) as she probably was annoyed to find herself reincarnated as the character “Elsa.”

  My children were tracking, too. I think they were glad that the years of turmoil were winding down. John writes:I can remember sitting down to read my dad’s first novel, Portofino. It was during the summer of 1992 and I sat outside on the deck eating bread dipped in hot chocolate. (Dad has a picture on his desk of me sitting there reading his novel.)

  If I remember correctly I finished the book that afternoon having sat there for the better part of the day. I knew that Portofino was based on his childhood and not completely biographical. But it was much more fun for me to treat it as a strict family history. It was an eye-opening experience for a twelve-year-old.

  I think most people have a moment in their lives when they finally see their parents for the first time outside of a selfish utilitarian worldview. Reading Portofino was the first time I saw my father. I saw him as a child through Calvin Becker (the protagonist of the novel) and for me Calvin will always be the picture of my father as a child, sitting between his parents with the look of thinly veiled mayhem in his eyes. Perhaps more importantly, I saw my father as a man for the first time in the way he worked on and promoted his book, as someone who deeply wanted to create something that was artistically valid and that would outlast him.

  62

  After Jim Buchfuehrer and I quit working together (and shut down Schaeffer V Productions in the mid eighties), and after I left the evangelical fold, Jim joined an Orthodox church. I would call him and complain about how lost I was feeling. Then in 1989, I visited Jim in Los Gatos and went to church with him. (There are Greek, Russian, and Antiochian Orthodox in America, as well as some others. The Orthodox groups all share the same liturgies and theology but happen to come from various national emigrant backgrounds. Jim was going to an Antiochian church.)

  I loved the liturgy. Somehow, in my mind it connected to everything I had loved most about Italy. There was nothing logical about this. For whatever reason, the liturgy made me feel as if I was standing in a warm piazza surrounded by milling friendly crowds. Sermons didn’t seem to be the point. The liturgy wasn’t an exercise in theology, but an unexplained and mysterious act of worship. In Orthodoxy, in the saints’ lives, in the beauty of the liturgy, in the respect for tradition I rediscovered what I had briefly experienced in my earliest childhood: faith couched in the most beautiful terms.

  When I converted to the Greek Orthodox Church (around Christmas of 1990), I was chrismated: anointed with oil, had a bit of hair trimmed off, and a gold cross put around my neck. I read the Nicene Creed out loud, spit on the Devil, renounced some things, affirmed others.

  My family reacted to my conversion in different ways. Genie, Jessica, her husband Dani, Francis, and John joined the Orthodox Church at different times a year or so after me and for their own reasons. John was ten, so he grew up serving at the altar. Jessica was already living in Finland and started going to the Finnish state Orthodox Church there. Francis sometimes drives up from where he lives (about forty-five minutes away) and joins Genie and me for church. These days, I don’t know what my children believe or don’t. I don’t ask. It’s none of my business. Genie’s family was pleased when we left the evangelical world and joined something that seemed more “Catholic” and therefore more familiar. My sisters and brothers-in-law were dismayed. Udo wrote several pointed articles about the “failures” of the Russian Orthodox Church and put them in the newsletter of the Francis Schaeffer Foundation. Susan dropped out of sight for a while. John Sandri was kind. I never heard a word from my oldest friends within the evangelical community.

  For a couple of years, I had the zeal of a convert and stuck my conversion in my sister’s faces. I was obnoxious. Of course, my ranting was ironic since Orthodox tradition teaches a transcendent mystery of faith, so that the type of heated historical (hysterical) “theological” arguments I was having were far more Protestant than Orthodox. Obviously I had missed the point.

  My conversion didn’t instantly turn my life around or fix every problem. Soon after I joined the Greek Orthodox Church, I was making Baby on Board and then marooned in Hollywood stuffing pork chops down my pants. And this was after I had spit on the Devil! On my sorties to Ralph’s, I’d sometimes wonder how my new Orthodox friends would take it if Genie had to ask them for bail money.

  The Greek Orthodox have access to the sacrament of confession. As the years went by I found that confession helped me draw a line under sins that had more or less tortured me. For instance, I confessed about the times I had slapped Jessica. Then Jessica and I had several talks that ended in tears, forgiveness, and all those things that faith is supposed to do.

  I received more spiritual edification out of working on the annual fund-raising food festival, shoulder-to-shoulder with some remarkably lovely people, as we prepared lamb shanks and trays of pasticcio and swept up the church hall, than from speaking, let alone being a “Christian leader.” It was better than parading around in front of audiences, talking about things I barely understood. And I liked deepening my relationship with the people I passed on the street every day in our town. I felt as if in some ways I was back living in my old village. I had
a deep local connection to my time and place again.

  Genie is the “Ladies’ Aid” treasurer. I’m just her husband. There are a few people in the congregation who read my novels and, at coffee hour, sometimes ask me questions. Unlike my old evangelical friends, real life doesn’t seem to upset them. I never have to “explain” about why I put sex in my books, swear words, or characters who don’t seem to be able to find Jesus.

  Genie and I like the fact that in our community, half the congregation comes to church late, so we can wander in at any time and still feel like we participated. And I don’t have to go to church more often than I can stand. When it starts to feel like religion again, I just drop out for a few months, then wander back.

  Perhaps I converted to the Greek Orthodox Church (rather than simply abandoning religious faith) because spirituality is a way to connect with people and might even be part of a journey toward God. (If there is a God.) According to Jesus, community is spirituality: “Love one another.”

  To me, the Greek Orthodox Church is not the community but a community. Community is an antidote to the poisonous American consumerist “me” and “I want” life that leads to isolation and unhappiness.

  Even if spirituality is an illusion that doesn’t resolve our longing for transcendent meaning or our need for other people, maybe the fact that we hope for more means that there is more. Perhaps we are somehow more than the sum of our brain chemistry. Maybe science explains the “how” of the brain but not the “why,” in the same way that a chemical analysis of the pigments used by van Gogh only explains what a painting is made of, not why we like it, much less what it is.

  When I left evangelicalism, it certainly was not because I was disillusioned with the faith of my early childhood. I have sweet (if somewhat nutty) memories of all those days of prayer, fasting, and “wrestling with principalities and powers.” We might have been deluded, but we weren’t unhappy. And there are a lot worse things than parents who keep you away from TV, grasping materialism, and hype, and let you run free and use your imagination.